“Urgghhh,” he gasped. “What?”
Three of the Archon’s Chosen were standing over him. One gripped his left arm, the other the right, while the third stripped his boots from him, quickly followed by his belt, pouch, and dagger, and then his coat and shirt, along with his other knife. The large pendant on the necklace at his throat was examined, found to be a blade, and removed as well.
Fingers plucked at his ear, but stopped as Aryadny spoke.
“Leave the earrings. They’re gold. She’ll want them.”
Hereward roared and struggled as his undershirt was lifted, and kicked at the third man, sending him reeling him back.
“Have no fear, Sir Hereward!” soothed Aryadny, who was standing by the door. “We merely wish to ensure you have no hidden weapons.”
“How dare you!” roared Hereward. “I’m a guest of your Archon!”
“Be easy,” said Aryadny. “Allow him up, gentlemen.”
Hereward staggered to his feet, and swayed in front of Aryadny, his shift billowing about his knees, his stockings around his ankles. No one noticed the wide garter on his left leg which had also fallen, after all it was only a piece of cloth. The men who had held him down stayed close, but it was Aryadny he watched, her and that thin dagger.
“I shall explain two possibilities to you, Sir Hereward,” said Aryadny, smiling. “The first is that you allow us to blindfold and lead you to an audience, which I assure you will be of profit; the second is we beat you a little short of senseless—for you will need to talk—and carry you there, and doubtless it will be of less profit. I give you the choice.”
“Bah! The Archon will hear of this,” said Hereward. “I choose the first of your so-kind alternatives. Who is it I am being taken to meet?”
“You will see,” said Aryadny. “When the blindfold comes off at our destination.”
They blindfolded the knight and led him quickly out into the hall and immediately through a secret door that Hereward had not known existed in the opposite wall, into a space where they were crammed together while Aryadny opened another door, from the sound of it one with a complex or little-used latch.
“Head down,” she instructed. “Pull his stockings up. There are steps, Hereward, lift your feet. Up.”
They climbed for some time. Hereward counted steps, for form’s sake, rather than any real need. At the two hundred and six mark, they stopped and he felt the warmth of the late afternoon sun on his face, and saw the edge of its light stealing in around his blindfold. From these things, he deduced they were outside, and atop one of the towers of the citadel—and he had a very nasty feeling everything was about to go hideously wrong.
“Leave us.”
The voice was a woman’s, and sounded calm and even kind. There was a general shuffling around Hereward; the hands that had held his arms were gone, and he heard his captors walk away and a door shut.
“You may remove your blindfold.”
Hereward pulled the blindfold off. It was very bright, and he lifted his hand to shield his eyes. He was not atop a tower, as he’d thought, but on a demi-lune or miniature bastion outthrust from the mountain of rock at its highest and most narrow point, with the sea below, the sky above, and all of Nikandros behind it.
The woman who had spoken, who for a moment he’d thought might be the Archon herself, was not. Which was a relief, because if she had been the Archon, the whole plan would have turned toward disaster. This woman had the same air of authority, and was similarly middle-aged, dark-haired, and olive-skinned, but she was older than the Archon. She sat on a carved stone bench and was eating olives, spitting the pips over the railing to fall the fourteen hundred feet to the sea.
As Mister Fitz had said truthfully earlier, there was nothing physically obvious to indicate she was a dragon, but Hereward had no doubts as to her identity, even before she spoke.
“You have found what you are looking for,” she said. “Or rather, part of what you seek. I am the dragon of Nikandros, but you will never have my treasure. Nor will you slay me. Your ‘imp-infested quarrels’ have been taken to the great smelter in the Levels and melted down, the pathetic entities within released. Your life is naturally forfeit. However, if you will tell me where you slew this other dragon, and where its hoard might lie, I may spare you.”
“That seems a fair offer, milady,” said Hereward. He sat down on his bottom, extended his legs, and pulled off his stockings, including the wide garter on the left.
“What are you doing?” asked the dragon. “If you hope to fashion a garotte, you are even more of a fool than I anticipated.”
She put down the olive she was about to eat and stood up.
“Oh, no, milady, they were uncomfortable,” said Hereward. He stood up, slipped the broad garter—an armband really—over his wrist and up on to his bicep. Then he tugged the earring from his left ear, lifted the small bone to his mouth and blew upon it. No sound came out, not even a butchered single note.
“Are you mad?” asked the dragon. “Or still drunk?”
“I might be still drunk,” admitted Hereward, backing up to the door. Reaching behind him, he tested the ring to open it and found it wouldn’t move.
“Even in this weaker human form, I can rip your heart from your chest in a trice,” said the dragon, flexing her hands to show him some long and very disturbing fingernails. “But I will start with something softer and more easy to detach if you do not tell me what I want to know. Where is this other dragon’s hoard?”
Hereward made a whimpering noise and blew on the golden bone again.
“Your eyes,” said the dragon. “I will pluck them and eat them like those olives. What was the dragon’s name?”
“I don’t know. Mister Fitz knows,” said Hereward. He gave up on the door and edged along the wall. But there was nowhere to retreat in the small demi-lune. There was the locked door behind, or over the walls to certain death far below.
“Sorcerous puppets are notably resistant to torture,” said the dragon. “They simply don’t care. Whereas you, I am sure, care greatly.”
“I do, I do,” said Hereward. He lifted the golden bone in his hand and blew on it for the third time, without result.
“Is that little golden pipe meant to do something?” asked the dragon. She tilted her head. “I sense no magic in it. Only gold, leavened with a tenth of silver.”
“Yes, it is meant to do something!” declared Hereward. Unwisely, he added, “Distract you.”
“From what?” asked the dragon, and then she moved incredibly swiftly, flinging herself down as Mister Fitz appeared over the wall, leveled one of his sorcerous needles, and unleashed a bolt of blindingly violet sorcerous energy.
Unfortunately, through a space in the air where the dragon no longer stood.
Hereward dived to the floor. Black blotches were floating in his vision, but he managed to see the dragon roll hard against the stone bench, even as Mister Fitz leaped onto it, readying his needle again. But the puppet lost his footing as the dragon heaved herself against the solid slab. With the shriek of stone on stone, it slid aside to reveal a deep hole, the entrance to some secret shaft. The dragon threw herself headfirst down it, legs flying.